Predator Free Whangarei

When we were asked to help with the Predator Free Whangarei system hosted on Northland Regional Council's ArcGIS Online portal, it was initially to provide temporary support as their internal GIS team were overstretched.
Once we had made a few changes and inserted some of our standard tools for Predator Free projects, they saw the awesome potential of ArcGIS Online and FME working in tandem and they starting asking the question - "what else can it do?"
This began an exciting partnership with Northland Regional Councill that continues to this day where we supply technical solutions across several of their projects and support their in-house team when they don't have the capacity.
We were fortunate enough with Predator Free Whangarei to be working with a project manager who constantly asked for functionality that pushed the boundaries of what people have built in the past and several of our now infamous tools have been born from this.

One of these tools, which we now include with all Predator Free project builds, is the "round date" system. Often projects like these require very fast frequency of trap, baitstation and trail camera checks on thousands of devices and it is very easy to get into a situation where you lose track of what device checks are current, due and overdue. This system provides an intuitive interface for the project manager to assign a due date for each device either individually, or in bulk and everyone using the system from managers to field workers can see when checks and due for each "round" of checks.
Another system that was born from this project was something we now affectionately refer to as "possum bingo". It is common in projects like this to block the operational area up into a grid with spacings based on the home range of the target species. If a possum is found either in a trap or on camera in one of these grid squares, the square turns red for that month. Watching the squares change symbology over time on the dashboard feels like your playing bingo, and when you finally have no presence on any squares - you win!
This system uses the power of FME to translate data created by image recognition software into the spatial features we see on the dashboards. And as we are analysing the trail camera photos anyway, it was not much more work to include the other species such as kiwi into the system.
Now we can display quite clearly on our dashboard visualisations what we have always known - when you eradicate the predators, the native species once again thrive!